Whatever you think about Elon, the push for innovation with Spacex has been admirable.
I've been more than a little disappointed with all the "they tried but it blew up" headlines that came in the days following the test flight.
The whole point is that this is bigger and more ambitious than any prior attempt - the failure is the most important part, it means you learn something.
Anything more than a failure to ignite should be considered a success in my book.
I agree with this sentiment. I have also been somewhat unsettled by the detractors here. I am not sure if this is purely an American sentiment, but it seems like more of the general population has started to view advancement in binary terms. In both science and public policy, it seems that an increasing proportion of the population view anything less than 100% success/improvement as an abject failure.
“ChatGPT couldn’t solve world hunger, nor could it come up with a peaceful solution to Israel and Palestine when I asked it! See, I told you it’s useless and not really intelligent.” — hyperbole but not even that far from some comments I’ve seen.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, because this is precisely what I'm seeing from both the IT crowd and the general public.
"Computers understand English now, but they occasionally make mistakes, so who cares?"
Something I've noticed is that GPT 4 seems to make mistakes less often than humans. That is, if you asked a random person to stand up in a lecture hall and answer questions thrown at them like the type people have been trying on ChatGPT, they would fail at least 50% of the time, like more.
For example, from what I can tell, GPT 4 has nearly perfect spelling and grammar. Better than mine, certainly, and up there with professional copy editors.
> I have also been somewhat unsettled by the detractors here.
I wouldn't worry about it. The news papers always view it in a sorta pessimistic way. I used to joke about this with spacex's booster landings. When they couldn't stick a landing even though the mission itself was successful, the news sites always made headlines that sounded like "welp, spacex screwed up again" lol :D
The news sites will always pick the headline that raises the most eyebrows.
As for my liking of spacex but my great distaste for the jackass known as Elon, well, that's nothing new. I was saying that 10 years ago lol. You can still cheer on the accomplishments all of the engineers are spacex are making. That's fine.
The problem with it is this is actually burning many millions of US taxpayer dollars. You think Musk is paying for it? Check SpaceX grants.
As for the failure, the Raptor 2 failures have caused a RUD on multiple Starship launches so far.
They should be back to static firing the Super Heavy or something, but this is not sexy enough for the billionaire.
Until the engine and launchpad works reliably, there is literally no point in launching the boosters when you have high probability of mission failure right at the launch. (Even if it clears the tower.)
Musk/SpaceX redefining failure as success is terribly annoying too. If done repeatedly enough it has the potential to tank the whole space program. They obviously wanted to test separation the most (since it was issued despite the control failure) and that failed too.
The director of nasa calls this a great success. So does a former astronaut.
> Thursday's launch was hailed as "a real accomplishment" and "so successful" by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and retired International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield, respectively. SpaceX agreed.
I read it more as jeering at private companies who promise the world and deliver a fraction of the product with price-gouging tactics.
Somewhere in there is an innovation that might do a public good, but most people are realising that corporations don't do public good. They do what they want.
If it was a government entity that tried and failed to reach for the stars, I think there'd be jeering too ("there go my tax dollars") but a large portion of the scientific community would be happy with the result.
>I am not sure if this is purely an American sentiment
My observation is that it is an online sentiment. But due to the way Technology news cycle works most of these online sentiment do have their source from America. So I think it is an American Sentiment being exported. But most places outside America, especially those without the usage of English being main language tends to be less affected.
I'm neither a fan nor a detractor of Elon Musk. The man has his faults. I am a huge fan of space exploration and the settlement of Mars, and therefore I really, really want SpaceX to succeed. For that reason I've been very critical of this test.
Professionals in the industry whose life work is the study of rocket plumes (e.g. @ DrPhiltill on Twitter) warned about what would happen if they proceeded with this plan. They were right. The FAA license application, as it turns out, was wildly off base and the projected environmental impact was off by as much as an order of magnitude, being based on an earlier design with much, much lower thrust.
This does not help the cause. It makes SpaceX come off as reckless, irresponsible, and untrustworthy. It makes it less likely that the FAA is going to sign off on a launch from Boca Chica again, and certainly not in the next year or so.
There needs to be some new word for, like, the "humblebrag" on behalf of a personality-cult.
Like, that low-key way where when you pretend to be in complete denial about all the reasons why people might delight in the failures (perceived or otherwise) of a Nazi billionaire's ridiculous vanity projects and then come to the highly self-serving (well, cult-leader serving) conclusion that "they must just be impatient with the saviour of mankind for not being the saviour of mankind enough"
On the contrary, I find it more concerning that people are willing to discount the efforts of hundreds of people to progress human spaceflight just because the CEO is an asshole.
It is interesting that you would immediately default to a cult-of-personality retort when I never mentioned Elon in my original post. SpaceX is not just one man.
The thing is the launch likely failed for reasons that were known beforehand and were noticable even to a layman.
They purposefully chose not to have a flame diverter, instead they were hoping to get away with simply blowing up the launchpad beneath them. I respect that they're trying to push boundaries, but this just seems foolish.
For a company so focused on reducing cost through reusability, why did they choose to blow up the launch pad upon launch? I understand building a flame diverter for a rocket this massive is an incredible amount of work, but if it makes subsequent launches cheaper then wouldn't that amortize the costs?
Some times you just have to try. This was way bigger than anything that's gone before. I'm sure they'll have plenty of data now to make the launch pad even better than it would otherwise have been.
Videos of the debris storm were pretty mind boggling to watch - it's difficult to comprehend the sheer amount of energy expended.
I am truly looking forward to the learnings published from this.
At the same time, if it would have taken several more months to install a flame diverter / metal plating below the launch pad, would that be worth it, or negate the progress made by gathering flight data? I'm not sure we can know that for sure.
I would hazard a guess that in the long term, it will have been the right decision.
keep in mind this is still a prototype rocket, they have no guarantee that they won't learn anything important about how this should look like or what issues it could introduce
they used something they knew to work so there is one less variable that should prevent liftoff
at this point there is no reducing the cost phase yet, they try to test assumptions and learn what and how things can go wrong. It's much better that things go wrong at test flight than at mission flight.
if they would get lucky and none of the issues would manifest, they could assume that design is perfect and do not try to improve it. so it's good if whatever can go wrong goes wrong at test flight
> if they would get lucky and none of the issues would manifest, they could assume that design is perfect and do not try to improve it. so it's good if whatever can go wrong goes wrong at test flight
I agree that the success should be measured in lessons learned from the launch. However we learned next to nothing about the second stage because the first stage failed for reasons that weren't unexpected.
So from that perspective the launch could be considered a failure, because they traded getting data on the second stage for learning a lesson that was already known.
assuming that this failure was caused by failed engines, I think this is a very important lesson, engines can fail during real missing and if their algorithms couldn't account correctly that, this is a very important thing to improve.
and remember, as you already mentioned, that stage 2 won't even start until stage 1 succeeds, so they need to perfect that first.
but I see your point, if they would manage to separate before stage 1 failure they could gather more data
Engines are not supposed to fail ever. Super Heavy does not have sufficient margin to handle multiple failures (maybe one, maybe), and Starship has the same engines, where one failing means it is liable to just fall from the sky.
Unless on the Moon, but then it would have to LEO or lunar orbit abort if it does not burn up on the spot and require a recovery mission.
Lunar Starship is the second stage, this was the first that did the damage. Even that is different from the one launched in the recent test; it’s a variant that will do the final landing on different engines high up on the rocket. Per Wikipedia:
> Within 100 meters of the lunar surface, the variant will utilize high‑thrust RCS thrusters located mid‑body to avoid plume impingement problems with the lunar regolith.
Landing is also very different than takeoff; the F9 takes off with nine, lands with one. Likewise, Super Heavy launches with 33, but Starship lands with 3-6, and three of those are the vacuum variant, with much less focused plumes.
Much fewer, half of them are vacuum variants (much less focused plume), and lunar gravity is much lower, meaning dramatically lower thrust required to get off the ground.
You were talking about F9 landing, and taking off with 33 engines. Only the first stage lands on the F9. Only the first stage has 33 engines. I guess it's more confusing when Starship is what the whole ship is called, and possibly the second stage.
And second stage has different engines since when? Starship proper is not that different, it has fewer engines, its landing gear provides worse conditions than the launchpad.
Second stage (Starship) has always had different engines (both in quantity and construction; some are vacuum Raptors) than Super Heavy. Lunar Starship is itself a variant of the regular second stage; it'll need the cargo elevator, for example, which is shown in NASA's announcement graphics.
> for the terminal descent of Starship, a few tens of meters before we touch down on the lunar surface, we actually use a high-thrust RCS system, so that we don't impinge on the surface of the Moon with the high-thrust Raptor engines. ... uses the same methane and oxygen propellants as Raptor.
(We'll see if that winds up being the actual final solution, but they've clearly at least thought about this aspect.)
The media (and pop culture in general) has a different understanding of failure. I think they're wrong.
I'm not sure I agree with you either, though. I'm a big believer in failing as often as possible and recovering in such a way that no customer or outside observer notices.
And the fact that rockets have a history of audacious risks and fantastic explosions is no excuse for that ongoing pattern. It's not just about fatalities or the raw cost of equipment lost. It's also about confidence and, where applicable, stock prices.
Any decent manager should understand that, so maybe it's another example of Musk's companies being mismanaged.
The problem is in modern mainstream media anything Elon does should be painted with a heavy dose of negative brush. All while adding more Social Media hatred to fuel the cycle.
You then see a lot of people are actually very supportive of SpaceX and Starship. They dont get the MSM media or Social media boost of their voice.
So now MSM and Social Media are changing their tone to question their previous reporting of "they tried but it blew up" and offer some insight to label it more like success.
I mostly agree, I think what irks is the combination of this approach and hubris at galactic scale (mostly just Musk I think, and some disciples thereof).
But hey, a well built rocket with a ton of hubris will still fly.
Success of failure will be defined by the FAA, let's see how will they approach issuing a launch license for the next test. Somehow i'm not too optimistic.
Kinda funny that the author didn't draw a connection between the pad damage and the engine failures. If the rocket is blasting a hole in the pad and throwing chunks of concrete hundreds of meters, you figure some of those pieces of debris might have gone upwards and damaged rocket engines?
It survived Max Q on the first launch with older (and different iterations) versions of the engine, what else is needed to make the demo of a first try a success?
Because of the engine failures, thrust wasn't as high as it would be in a nominal flight, so max aerodynamic pressure was lower. It didn't hit the max Q it would experience in a regular launch.
The whole thing was a test. The ship and rocket themselves would always have been scrapped afterwards, and the goal of the whole endeavor was to get back as much data as possible.
They succeeded in launching the rocket, having it take off and reach max-Q and got valuable data on all that. That's the successful part. They also learnt some hard lessons on launch pad construction.
Then the ship failed and the test was aborted - and they never got to test stage separation, which they had planned to do as well. That's the unsuccessful part.
So, did they get the data they wanted? Not all they wanted - but an important chunk of it.
The max-Q they hit was much slower than the intended max-Q would be at, so the aerodynamic pressure was also much lower. So they didn't really gain any data about the performance at the real max-Q.
Regardless, that rocket flipped and turned so many times while being top heavy yet the booster only collapsed at the very end. It think that is commendable.
So they say. Fueling data is redundant (they faced the same issue that caused the hold before a few times). Raptor 2 also has failed before with entertaining but expensive results. If it's in the same way, we do not know.
Since they're not saying anything about the data that was gathered or was going to be gathered we're all going by SpaceX marketing.
They might have been aiming for structural load data on the coupling, or might not. Engine relighting maybe, or maybe not. They might have been going after trust vectoring, or not...
On the topic, I think the Falcon Heavy launch has given us unrealistic perspective on the success of experimental launch vehicles.
It went so flawlessly that most people online were pissed Elon didn't use it to launch some useful payload and considered his Roadster launch a vanity project, not realizing it could have gone Kaboom just like the Starship launch, and all Elon would have to show for it would have been the shreds of his roadster.
When things go successfully, it's all Gwynne Shotwell and her team of Engineers to praise; when it goes south it's Elon and big mouth to blame for the all the issues.
Maybe we need to realize it's all a test, that has Elon wanted, there would be NO press coverage and we wouldn't even have known a Test had happened, or that vehicle like Starship even existed.
There's no way for SpaceX to hide a static fire from anyone, much less a launch. It's not a thing. This is not a stealth airplane. Even if unannounced nerds would fish it out.
True, but without Elon's say so, there wouldn't be 8K slomo and close up drone shots etc. We wouldn't even know it was called starship, or something like that existed.
Anyone on the beach could have made a video of the rocket launch itself, but we wouldn't have been able to get the destroyed launch pad pictures etc. We definitely wouldn't have had any video of the insides of the Merlin rocket factory
(i am not sure that without access to the spacex video feed and launch countdown, nerds would have been able to timely setup cameras to record something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mX5H_Gaicg )
We have shockingly good access to information that no one else gives, imho.
What SpaceX is doing is amazing, and it is a fun show. Reusable rockets are beginning to be as cool as the space shuttle was. However, it could very well be the case the Shotwell and the engineers are actively trying to prevent Musk from making bad calls while promoting good calls (I'm not saying this was a bad call). It's perfectly reasonable, if you have a company controlled by two actors, one of them bad and one of them good, to always praise the good actor when things go right and blame the bad actor when things go wrong (caveat: I am not calling Elon a bad actor, just saying that it's not hypocritical to always blame the bad actor and praise the good actor).
But this leads to a bigger problem. SpaceX's attitude of experiment vs. drawn-out design is working (perhaps not too dissimilar to agile vs. waterfall design). Even with all that careful planning, the Space Race did kill people, we almost lost Apollo 13, and there were two distinct shuttle disasters that killed everyone on board. Even with very careful progress, we still had disasters. But, as I think this launch shows, SpaceX is going to experience similar events unless there's a incentives and structures to actually empower people with safety concerns (meaning the engineers and technicians on the ground).
Both post-mortems on the shuttle disasters are filled with something like "a higher-up decided it wasn't that big of a deal and dismissed concerns because previous red flags turned out to be nothing." Single humans can be singularly stupid. Single humans that are busy running a company, incentivized by profit margins, isolated from on-the-ground operations, equipped with a golden parachute, and wealthier than god, are even more prone to detachment from reality.
I also feel a bit bad for the astronauts that have to gamble whether these rockets are safe. Did this actually pass safety checks or is my life a sacrifice Elon Musk is willing to make? I suppose this has been part of the calculus of all astronauts since the post-Space Race era started to defund NASA, but it still sucks even if it's de rigueur at this point.
> I also feel a bit bad for the astronauts that have to gamble whether these rockets are safe. Did this actually pass safety checks or is my life a sacrifice Elon Musk is willing to make?
isn't that an unfair assertion? Elon does not have the ability to rate his rockets "human safe", NASA did it. They make the final call, imho.
I have no idea who makes the final call, but NASA has shown they too were willing to jeopardize the life of their crew once budget cuts had removed any margins for them. I'm also not saying that Elon has made bad safety calls, but what I am saying is the Elon has every incentive in the world to push past safety concerns. Worst that can happen for him is he'll have to give an apology and payout $X0m. We also have to be a bit concerned because there are reports that Elon thinks he's ensuring humanity's survival. I do not trust someone who thinks that his mission is existential despite no evidence that a standalone Mars colony is possible. Bad incentives are present for the NASA admin too: worst that can happen is perhaps having to resign. The astronauts die, their kids don't have a parent, their partners have to bury them.
It wasn’t a complete failure. SpaceX will learn a lot from this launch. But I believe this design is not super reliable. Synchronizing 32 rocket engine is not easy. Perhaps this will be a great cargo ship. As for carrying astronauts to Mars, I’m not so sure. Only time will tell.
> The Soviets abandoned that project because they couldn't get their 30 engines to synchronize. Maybe this time AI (c) will help solve the problem. We will watch and see.
Worth mentioning that N-1 was severely limited by the state of electronics technology in late 60s Soviet Union. The first 3 launches of the N-1 rocket didn't even have a digital flight computer, they relied on an [analogue system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)#Engine_control_sys...).
The Space Falcon Heavy uses 27 engines and it has a perfect reliability record over five launches. Having many engines on a rocket is a solved problem and it even brings some advantages - you can still reach orbit if you lose one or two of them.
IMHO, the headline is a decent philosophical question. The clickbaity ones focus on the explosion, almost ignoring the resounding success of propelling all that mass to 39 km.
Sorry you missed the actual launch! I was on the edge of my seat while at the computer.. Hard to imagine what in-person felt like.
It was right from the word go, meant to be a destructive test flight. It flew, it was destroyed and in the process they learned a lot about stage 0 and about the performance of the engines and the structural strength of the whole thing.
I am surprised it's been so ambiguous for some. It is what it is, they did a test and learned some stuff. We can bikeshed all day about how good of a test it was but we aren't the ones sifting through the telemetry and making fixes.
There was also so much to be impressed by, the integrity of the vehicle at those speeds and spins was really cool to see, and that it got off the ground for the first fully integrated was awesome.
Lots went really well. It doesn't take much going wrong to blow a rocket up, so I am impressed with SpaceX in this instance.
It’s the biggest and most capable rocket yet and it flew higher and faster than the second most powerful (the N1) ever did. It’s progress. Success or failure of the test itself is secondary. We’re getting closer to the stars.
I think it is commendable that so many raptors failed yet no engine blew up and caused a catastrophic failure, remember what happened with SN11 and one of the boosters?
Most powerful rocket ever, with 33 engines, lifted off on first attempt and flew a few kms.
From my point ot view, considering Spacex philosophy, it's totally a success.
I've been more than a little disappointed with all the "they tried but it blew up" headlines that came in the days following the test flight.
The whole point is that this is bigger and more ambitious than any prior attempt - the failure is the most important part, it means you learn something.
Anything more than a failure to ignite should be considered a success in my book.